AbstractIn XIX century, Italy represented an essential step for scientists aimed to study its most typical and significant geological sites. The result was the publication of a great number of papers dealing with the geological features of Italy in all the European languages. Among them, the German geologist Otto Hermann Wilhelm Abich was undoubtedly one the most important researchers that worked in Italy between 1833 and 1839, and devoted his research activity on the study of active and extinct volcanoes. Abich carried out several topographical surveys, mineralogical and petrographical analyses, and published several scientific papers, describing the structure, activity and history of Etna, Vesuvius and the other volcanoes in Southern Italy. In 1840, Abich moved to Dorpat, in Estonia, becoming the most important geologist of that region. Nevertheless, he never forgot the time spent in Italy that he visited again in 1856-57. This latter period pushed him to process the new collected data and those saved from the fire that destroyed his St. Petersburg office in 1863. The analysis of papers, private correspondence, and some original watercolours found in the Archive of the Geological Survey of Italy - ISPRA, has emphasized his admiration for Italian geological features and landscapes.

AbstractA main volcanic marker has been identified for the first time on the continental shelf of the northern Phlegraean Fields in the Gulf of Gaeta (Campania region, eastern Tyrrhenian margin, Italy) by means of Subbottom Chirp profile grid and stratigraphic analysis of a core collected on the slope. In the seismic sections, the core bottom corresponds to the top of a continuous and parallel reflector (V) interbedded within the transgressive deposits of the Late Quaternary-Holocene depositional sequence. The Transgressive System Tract deposits are particularly thick compared to the majority of the transgressive deposits of other shelf settings. This might be due to the input of pyroclastic and volcaniclastic deposits related to the intense eruptive activity of the Campania Plain during the Late Pleistocene-Holocene time span. Undulations and pockmarks are the main morphological features of the sea floor and they might be linked to gas uprising, widely detected in the study area. The V reflector is located on the shelf from northeast to southwest at different depths, ranging from 10 ms (about 8 m) to 30 ms (about 25 m) below sea floor and it can be mapped down to the continental slope. The tephrostratigraphic analysis of this continuous reflector allowed to correlate it with the Neapolitan Yellow Tuff deposits emplaced at Phlegraean Fields at ca. 15 ka.